Trojans are versatile and very popular, so it’s difficult to characterize every kind. That said, most Trojans are designed to take control of a user’s computer, steal data, spy on users, or insert more malware on to a victim’s computer. Here are some common threats that come from Trojan attacks:
- Backdoors, which create remote access to your system. This kind of malware changes your security to allow the hacker to control the device, steal your data, and even download more malware.
- Spyware, which watches as you access online accounts or enter your credit card details. They then transmit your passwords and other identifying data back to the hacker.
- Zombifying Trojans, which take control of your computer to make it a slave in a network under the hacker’s control. This is the first step in creating a botnet (robot + network), which is often used to perform a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack designed to take down a network by flooding it with traffic.
- Downloader Trojans, Emotet being a good example, download and deploy other malicious modules, such as ransomware or keyloggers.
- Dialer Trojans, which might seem anachronistic since we don’t use dial-up modems any longer. But more on this in the next section.